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19.1.16

On The Eve Of The Romanian Revolution – Some Considerations (III)Larry L. Watts

Visit of Romanian leaders to Budapest in the mid-1960s

Hungary and the ‘Aggressive Romanian Military Threat’: June 1989

During the late 1980s allegations of Romania’s terrorism-provoking nationalism and aggressive military impulse were so persistently repeated and widely disseminated as to persuade many Western intelligence services that a domestic military coup and chauvinist attack against ethnic Hungarians (and other minority groups) in Transylvania were quite possible.[i] According to a mid-1988 assessment by the CIA, for example, a “widespread uprising” resulting in “near-anarchy could lead to a seizure of power by the military,” while domestic violence could “turn into ethnic violence directed at the Hungarian minority in Transylvania.”[ii] The assessment continued that only “incipient anarchy” – or a threat “to remove Romania from the Warsaw Pact” – would render Soviet military intervention a “plausible contingency.”[iii]

Kadar and Ceausescu, May 1967

CIA analysts also expressed the belief that succession “may invite East-West rivalry as Moscow attempts to reassert influence” over the regime “most defiant of Soviet strictures,” and that even moderate disorder “would offer [Moscow] opportunities for restoring lost influence.”[iv] However, the CIA then affirmed somewhat contradictorily that “Romania’s problems were homegrown,” as if Soviet efforts to impose its influence and control on Bucharest were unrelated to Romania’s problems.[v]

In mid-June 1989, Hungarian Politburo member and reform economist Imre Poszgay publicly confirmed one of the circumstances that would provoke an incursion by the Soviet Army within the Soviet Bloc:

Imre Pozsgay

"A Soviet military intervention could occur in only one case: the outbreak of a civil war, which would threaten the security of Europe by upsetting the balance of forces. This is a danger that we can avert if we here are able to bring about a phase of peaceful transition."[vi]

Privately, Hungarian authorities suspected as late as November 1989 that an attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact would provoke Soviet military intervention.[vii] Indeed, Soviet military standing orders for its units in the Odessa Military District, which Romanian intelligence obtained during the mid-1980s, indicated exactly the same two precipitants for a military (or paramilitary) intervention into Romania identified by the CIA – an attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact or general instability.[viii] According to former Deputy Soviet Foreign Minister Ivan Aboimov, who in December 1989 was also the Warsaw Pact Secretary General and the head of the Crisis Cell on Romania (together with the Chief of the General Staff Mikhail Moiseyev and KGB foreign intelligence chief Leonid Shebarshin), the Romanian debate over the possible public release of this document prompted Moscow to uncharacteristically rush the declassification of the December 24, 1989 meeting in which Ambassador Jack Matlock expressed U.S. understanding of a possible Soviet intervention following U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s apparent acknowledgment of the same on U.S. television earlier that day.[ix]

Ivan Aboimov

Moscow quite evidently became so dedicated to this bit of “transparency” as a means of preempting reputational and possible political repercussions should knowledge of Soviet contingency plans regarding Romania were made public.[x] Aboimov failed to note that the White House officially denounced (i.e. “clarified”) Baker’s statement (thus underscoring the questionable nature of the State Department instructions to Matlock to make that approach) the following day.[xi] The controversy over how those instructions were generated and transmitted continued to be debated among U.S. principles within diplomatic and intelligence circles into the new millennium.[xii]

At the end of the 1980s there was – and, interestingly, continues to be – a generalized reluctance to acknowledge that Moscow (or other bloc members) had contingency plans for intervening militarily that would become operational in case general instability ensured (or was provoked) within other members of the Warsaw Pact. In contrast, an entire mythology was created regarding alleged Romanian violence against its citizens seeking to escape the country. The Hungarian media printed numerous reports claiming that scores and even hundreds were killed while attempting to flee Romania, even after they had reached the Hungarian side of the frontier.[xiii] Such reporting in the local and central media, common enough during 1988 and 1989, implied that Romanian authorities were responsible for killing refugees within Hungary – an act of war requiring forceful response – consequently inciting anti-Romanian sentiment.

On more than one occasion Hungarian authorities publicly denied these reports. The Hungarian police did so, for instance, regarding a January 1989 accusation made by the Hungarian Democratic Forum to the head of the Hungarian National Assembly that the bodies of eighteen “escapees from Romania” had been found at the frontier.[xiv]However, such denials by necessity appeared in later editions and broadcasts and rarely as lead stories. In the meantime, the damage had been done and Hungarian audiences were imprinted with images of refugees stumbling across the bodies of dead children on the Romanian-Hungarian border, where crows were “already picking at their corpses.”[xv]

Soviet, Hungarian and other Warsaw Pact sources reported a “rush to the exits” that had Romanians of all ethnicities fleeing the country under a hail of fire.[xvi] These reports then re-surfaced in Western media, including Radio Free Europeanalyses, alleging, for example, that “the Romanian-Yugoslav border had become the bloodiest in Europe” and that some 400 Romanian citizens had been shot while trying to escape to Yugoslavia.[xvii] According to one RFE analyst there was even a “spill-over effect across the Romanian-Soviet border” that confronted “Soviet authorities with the unprecedented problem of how to deal with refugees from a neighboring communist country” and compelled Moscow to seek “solutions to the ethnic and social tension behind it.”[xviii]

However, as another journalist noted, it was “difficult to reconcile these stories with the fact that some 6,500 people managed to escape illegally in 1988 by crossing the border into Hungary.”[xix] Rather than questioning why such allegations might be made, given that so many similar reports regarding the Hungarian border had proven false repeatedly, the journalist suggested instead that the “inconsistency itself could possibly have been devised [by Bucharest] to keep the would-be escapees as insecure as possible.”[xx] Thus, Romania authorities were alleged to be responsible for spreading false stories of their own brutality at the border in the international media in order to discourage citizens from attempting escape. The simpler explanation, that those reports were intended to discredit Romania and to advance the interests of Budapest and Moscow as opposed to those of Bucharest, was deemed far-fetched.

Of course, successful propagation of the image of Romanian violence, especially anti-minoritarian violence, suited those members of the Hungarian leadership in Budapest seeking support for a transfer of sovereignty over the region of Transylvania; if not to Hungary than at least away from Romania. Such allegations were anchored to a scenario of increasing violence, and neither Hungarian nor Soviet sources were reticent in making explicit references to its inevitability. Indeed, throughout this period Soviet and other Warsaw Pact media were consistently prejudicial in their coverage of Hungarian-Romanian tensions, ignoring or deriding Romanian positions and denials while giving full voice and support to Hungarian allegations.[xxi]

In August 1988, for example, Hungarian television invited Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Petrovsky and Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev for a discussion regarding the necessity of territorial autonomy for the ethnic Hungarians of Transylvania.[xxii] The Soviet diplomat likened “Romanian-Hungarian tension and the nationality situation in Transylvania to the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh,” over which Azerisand Armenianswere already violently clashing in 1988.[xxiii] Devolving into full-scale war, the death toll of that conflict would reach 28,000-38,000 by the early 1990s.

Vladimir Petrovsky

Medvedev took the Romanian regime to task for alleged “repression of the Hungarian minority” and then advocated the reconstitution of Stalin’s “Autonomous Region in Transylvania” as the solution the problem.[xxiv] Reinstatement of the autonomous region thenceforth became a slogan that Hungarian leaders would repeat through Romania’s December 1989 Revolution and well into the new millennium. Stalin had originally imposed the Hungarian Autonomous Region on Bucharest in order to better control the Romanians (and Hungarians); not to extend human and civil rights guarantees to beleaguered populations.[xxv]

In July 1989, after insisting that the extension of Hungarian sovereignty over Romania’s ethnic Hungarians “did not imply revisionist intentions” – Budapest having proclaimed its “duty to feel responsible for Hungarians who had found themselves living outside Hungary’s present borders after the First and Second World Wars” – International Department chief Mátyás Szűrös, who since March was also speaker for the Hungarian Parliament, expressed to a Radio Free Europe journalist his belief that “the best solution to the problem would have been to grant Transylvania ‘autonomy’ after World War II.”[xxvi] Seemingly lost to the Hungarian speaker was the fact that the wartime occupation of that region by Hungary had resulted in the complete disenfranchisement of the Romanian majority, the confiscation of their property, and a systematic execution of the elites in Romanian settlements.[xxvii]

Mátyás Szűrös and Istvan Csurka

Szűrös avoided specifying “what kind of autonomy he had in mind” when pressed by the journalist, claiming instead that Hungary did not suffer from the blight of extreme chauvinism while insisting that Romania pursued such policies towards its minorities and towards all of its neighbors. According to Szűrös:

"We must do everything to protect the equal rights of the Hungarian national minority in Transylvania…In Hungarythere are, in fact, no truly irredentist or revisionist tendencies. It is, however, possible that nationalismis present in the minds of some individuals or within small groups. This is not the problem. The problem begins when nationalism is raised to the status of official policy. This is what has happened in Romania. Romanian policies are not only anti-Hungarian but are also directed against the Soviet Unionand against the southern Slavs."[xxviii]

One of the first measures undertaken at the start of Romania’s December 1989 Revolution by then-ad interim Hungarian President Mátyás Szűrös was to unilaterally abrogate the 1948 Hungarian-Romanian Friendship and Cooperation Treaty that formally established the frontier between the two states.[xxix] According to President Szűrös, Hungary could now with “clear conscience” support and assist Transylvania to “become an autonomous region” with its “rightful independence.”[xxx] Side-stepping the question from a New York Times correspondent as to the aim and consequences of abrogating the only agreement in which Budapest officially recognized the post-World War II Hungarian-Romanian border, Foreign Minister (and former International Department security section head) Gyula Horn claimed that the “the bases which created the agreement have ceased,” rendering its further existence “untenable.”[xxxi]

Gyula Horn

A principal active measures theme propounded throughout 1989 was that of the rising Romanian military threat towards various other Warsaw Pact members. In discussion with his Western and Israeli colleagues in Bucharest, for example, Hungarian Ambassador Szűcs insisted on an impending Romanian armed aggression against his country, claiming that the Romanian Army had been placed on alert “several times” in preparation for such an offensive.[xxxii]First introduced during the Polish crisis of 1980, by May 1989 the Soviet active measures theme that Ceauşescu secretly advocated military intervention against other alliance members in the service of ideological orthodoxy was now becoming a regular feature of Western analyses.[xxxiii]

During the spring and summer of 1989, Mátyás Szűrös, Gyula Horn, Géza Kótai, and Csaba Tabajdi; all senior alumni from the Hungarian communist party’s (HSWP) International Department– the Central Committee’s coordinating center for Hungarian active measures– repeatedly claimed on-going atrocity and aggressive Romanian militarypreparations, setting the stage for confrontation and justifying beforehand forceful counter-measures. In mid-June 1989, Tabajdi, the deputy chief of the International Department’s section for relations with ruling parties, told the Italian journal La Stampathat “the great majority of Hungarians know that an attack would not come from the west but from the southeast,” in other words, from Romania.[xxxiv]HSWPPolitburo member Imre Poszgay, soon to become deputy head of the HSWPin its new incarnation as the Hungarian Socialist Party, seconded Tabajdi, explaining that the “radical revision” of Hungarian Defense Policyhad been driven by Budapest’s “recognition that any foreseeable attack” would originate from Romania and not from NATO.[xxxv]

Csaba Tabajdi

As one RFE analyst observed, the new Hungarian military strategy necessitated the redeployment of “troops that for four decades have been stationed on the frontier with Austria” in the west towards the “southeast region”; thus “from the frontier with Austria to that with Romania.”[xxxvi]Tabajdi received a slap on the wrist from the Hungarian communist leadership following his statements to La Stampa. Ironically, he did not receive it for misrepresenting Hungarian policy but for revealing that policy to foreign observers. While Tabajdi’s immediate boss, Geza Kótai, noted that his subordinate had “not invented anything new,” Szűrös explained that “Tabajdi had made a ‘tactical error’ in talking about such matters while he was abroad.”[xxxvii]

[vi] Kevin Devlin, “Hungary’s New Defense Doctrine: ‘Enemy Not The West But Romania,’” RAD Background Report/101, Radio Free Europe Research (RFER), 16 June 1989, p. 3. Likewise, Szűrös noted that Moscow would not tolerate Romania’s departure from the Warsaw Pact. As he told an RFE journalist in July 1989, “the Soviet Union considers it essential for Romania to remain a [member of] the Warsaw Pact.” Moscow’s “priority is to maintain the [present] system of alliances for as long as NATO exists.” Interview of Hungarian Parliamentary spokesman and former HSWP CC International Department chief Szűrös by Nestor Ratesh in Michael Shafir, “Matyas Szűrös’s Interview with RFE’s Romanian Service,” RAD Background Report/127, RFER, 20 July 1989a, p. 6.

[vii] See e.g. Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 139-142.

[viii] The Soviet standing military order was discovered in 1993 and its public release debated in several meetings of Romania’s Supreme Defense Council (CSAT) at the beginning of 1994. This author, then working as security sector reform consultant with the Romanian defense ministry, general staff and foreign intelligence agency, was made aware of that debate. Several CSAT members subsequently confirmed the main elements of the Soviet standing order.

[x] To quote Aboimov: “When I became the Ambassador in Budapest, I was informed that Iliescu was about to accuse the USSR of preparing intervention in the Romanian affairs during the revolution in 1989. Then the Russian Foreign Ministry decided to declassify the record of my talk with the US Ambassador Jack Matlock.” Ibid. Aboimov served as Soviet and then Russian Ambassador to Hungary during 1990-1996.

[xi] Statement by the Press Secretary, White House, December 25, 1989 cited in Robert L. Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider’s Account of U.S. Policy in Europe, 1989-1992, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 381; Thomas Blanton, “When Did The Cold War End?” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 10 (March 1998): 184-191. Evidently unaware of Aboimov’s revelation that Romanian actions prompted the uncharacteristic voluntary declassification, Blanton observed that: “In 1994, the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation declassified and published these selected documents, for the obvious reason that the Soviets come off quite well in the exchange with the Americans.” (p. 185.)

[xii] Blanton presents the basic elements of this debate with Robert L. Hutchings, at the time the U.S. National Intelligence Officers responsible for coordinating the National Intelligence Estimates issued jointly by the U.S. intelligence community, criticizing the message as “unfortunate,” and the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock, defending the message (despite the official White House disapproval at the time). Blanton (1998), pp. 185-188, footnote 17. See also Hutchings (1997), p. 86.

[xiv] The Gyula branch of the Hungarian Democratic Forum sent the letter on 9 January 1989. “Weekly Record of Events in Eastern Europe,” RFER, 13 January 1989, OSA, Box 120, Folder 2, Report 293, p. 7. There was a shooting incident at the Romanian-Hungarian border in May 1988 that resulted in at least one casualty. However, the cause of the incident and the identity and location of the victim(s) remain unclear. Ceausescu referred to the incident briefly in the 18 June 1988 Central Committee meeting in a manner that suggested its singularity.

[xxvii] See e.g. the reports of the German-Italian commissions of inquiry (Altenburg-Roggeri, October 1940, and Roggeri-Hencke, February 1943) presented in Vasile Puşcaş, Al doilea Război Mondial: Transylvania şi aranjamentele europene (1940-1944)[The Second World War: Transylvania and European Arrangements (1940-1944)], Cluj, Fundaţia Culturala Română [Romanian Cultural Foundation], 1995. The United States also obtained the final report of the second, Roggeri-Hencke commission inquiry. See “Report by the Special Italo-German Commission sent to Hungary and Romania.” Berlin, 8 February 1943, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), General Records of the Department of State, Division of South-East European Affairs, No. 871,000/1-3045, U.S. Consul in Geneva, Paul Squire, to Secretary of State, 30 January 1945.

[xxix] The intention to unilaterally abrogate the Hungarian-Romanian Friendship Treaty was floated publicly in July 1988, almost a year and a half earlier, as a recommendation to the Hungarian National Assembly’s Foreign Relations Committee. The reason given at the time was the closing of the Hungarian Consulate in Cluj. Reuter, 29 June 1988; AP, 30 June 1988. See also Dan Ionescu, “Chronology of Hungarian Protests at Romanian Rural Resettlement Plans,” RAD Background Report/129, RFER, 9 July 1988.

[xxx] Arpad Zengo interview with Szűrös on Budapest domestic radio in Hungarian, 20 December 1989, 0545 hrs GMT, in FBIS-EEU-89-243, 20 December 1989, p. 47. The day before, soon-to-be-named deputy defense minister of Hungary, Ernő Raffay, stated to the same journalist that since the Hungarians in Transylvania “have never wanted to live on Romania’s territory,” he could say, “as a National Assembly deputy, that I will do everything to fulfill, sooner or later, this wish of Magyardom in Romania.” Op. cit., p. 46. See also Costache Codrescu, coordinator, Armata Română în revoluţia din decembrie 1989: Studiu documentar [The Romanian Army in the Revolution of December 1989: A Documentary Study], revised 2nd edition, Bucharest, Editura Militară, 1998, p. 43. This call was echoed by the former senior Romanian Communist Party official, Károly Király.